WE NEED MORE BUREAUCRATS...:

The man with a plan: A new Jeffrey Sachs book on how to end global poverty provides fresh insights but stale solutions (Salil Tripathi, April 21, 2005, Guardian Unlimited)

Like No Logo or Globalisation and its Discontents, Sachs's The End of Poverty is ubiquitous among development practitioners and students fed up with the state of the world. And quite rightly, too.

The dire poverty in which one-sixth of humanity lives is a matter of deep shame. And Sachs eloquently presents their stories, telling us of the nearly 20,000 people who die daily because of extreme poverty; of a grandmother who is looking after nearly two dozen Aids orphans, of women who spend up to seven hours a day walking miles to collect water and cook for the family.

He issues a challenge to the Department of International Development, which wants to sell mosquito nets in malaria-prone regions of Africa as a social marketing experiment. These people can't afford to buy the nets - just give them to them, Sachs pleads.

Sachs has little time for those who talk of tough love; still less for those who are worried that someone will sell the nets on the black market, pocket the money and transfer it to a Swiss bank account. He acknowledges that corruption is a problem, but insists it is not the sole cause of poverty. Many other factors are at work, he says, including bad climate, geography, politics, international trade policies, the burden of debt and the absence of relief.

When the G8 leaders meet in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July, Sachs wants them to come with their chequebooks. Excuses won't do. States in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) must live up to the widely-accepted standard of 0.7% of gross domestic product to be given as aid.

Few would quarrel with the problems and priorities Sachs identifies; few would question the basic assumption that greater flow of resources is desirable, other things being equal. But the solutions have been tried before.

The question is, will it work now? Sachs suggests that if the detailed suggestions he has made about micromanaging agricultural, health, technological and fiscal policies in the developing world are carried out properly, extreme poverty will vanish by 2025.

Because, after all, when has centralized micromanagement ever failed to solve a problem?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 21, 2005 9:06 PM